If you somehow haven't heard about it before, this is about the TikTok question asking women if they would rather encounter a bear or a man in the woods. Many women chose the bear, and many men were offended. As a man, I would also choose the bear, but I don't think that makes me sexist against my own sex. If the question was instead woman vs. bear, I would still choose the bear, and if it was woman vs. man, I would choose the man.

My reasoning is that if your first priority is to survive, I definitely think you should choose the human over the bear. But to me, there are fates worse than death. I would rather be mauled to death by a bear than raped. Even if the bear is more likely to kill me than a human is to rape or kill me, I would choose the higher risk of being killed in order to eliminate the risk of being raped. Bears don't rape people, so I prefer them over humans of any gender. As a man, I would pick the man over the woman because statistics say that 68.6 or 79.2 percent of male rape victims have female perpetrators. If I were a woman, I would pick the woman instead.

I think part of the reason I'm so sure I would rather be killed than raped is that I have been raped, so I know what that's like and that I would do anything to not have that happen to me again. Men and women are taught very different things about sexual violence, and it's much less socially acceptable for male victims to talk about it. I think that makes it's harder for men compared to women to imagine it happening to them. I think this might be part of why a lot of men and women seem to struggle to understand each other's perspectives on this question.

To be clear, I'm not defending the ideological message behind the question or sexism of any kind. My point is just that a woman who answers "bear" because she would rather risk death than rape (or one of the other horrible things humans but not bears do) is not being irrational or sexist by giving that answer. Both answers are perfectly valid.